


Darkly, Through a Kaleidoscope

by sparxwrites



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Abuse, Character Study, Experimental Style, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Prostitution, Repressed Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 06:58:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19847941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: There’s not much Caleb remembers from the ten years he spent in the asylum. He’s okay with this, mostly; has made his peace with it, mostly. From what he does remember, though, most of it is inconsequential. The cries of the other patients, the pale white-gone-grey of the nurses’ aprons, the lukewarm baths… these are things he can forget.One memory, though, he keeps coming back to. Over and over, worrying at the hazy details of it like a loose, aching tooth.





	Darkly, Through a Kaleidoscope

**Author's Note:**

> An old thing I decided to finish up, bc I was sick of it sitting in my drafts. Written for [this](https://criticalkink.dreamwidth.org/3194.html?thread=634234#cmt634234) kinkmeme prompt. Please do go check out the link if you can stomach this fill, because there is a much longer, utterly _fantastic_ second fill there that’s very upsetting and also very much worth reading.

There’s not much Caleb remembers from the ten years he spent in the asylum. He’s okay with this, mostly; has made his peace with it, mostly. From what he _does_ remember, though, most of it is inconsequential. The cries of the other patients, the pale white-gone-grey of the nurses’ aprons, the lukewarm baths… these are things he can forget.

One memory, though, he keeps coming back to. Over and over, worrying at the hazy details of it like a loose, aching tooth. He’s not sure if it’s a single memory, or many, so similar that they overlap – fragments of recollection sliding frictionlessly against one another to make an unsteady whole. From the way it shifts, ever-so-slightly, faintly contradictory timelines and variations that he can’t quite reconcile, he thinks it’s probably many. He hopes it’s only one.

(His usual routine is interrupted, a few times a week, by a man that sometimes cares for him. He is taken away from his room, just after breakfast, to another room, a new room. Over time, he learns to hate it – the hard bed, the cold white walls, the way the man straps him down wrists and ankles no matter how loudly he moans, cries, sobs. Never too loudly, though. The man gags him, if he’s too loud. Mad though he is, he’s still capable of learning – with enough negative reinforcement.)

He doesn’t remember it clearly. He’s not sure if that’s a blessing, or a curse, but it is what it is – distorted, fractured memories, seen darkly through a kaleidoscope, clearest when they haunt his nightmares in vivid, unreal technicolour. Flashes of impressions, is all, half memories that stop and start and shift when he looks at them too closely. 

(Hands on his skin, hands on his legs, hands between his legs. A mouth on his neck. Weight on his chest. Pain, more than pleasure, a sharp shock of sensation after so long in a grey haze of nothingness. Skin against his skin, awful, unbearable, _itching_ \- A stilling, a grunt, pressure on his chest and something wet between his legs. The slow slide out, the wet spilling of something against his skin and the sheets. Clothes, the clink of a buckle – the clink of coins changing hands, and the low murmur of voices. There is sometimes, he remembers, quiet laughter, a slap on his inner thigh or his arse, or fingers between the cleft of his cheeks, probing into him where he’s wet and open and red-raw. Even through the fog, the confusion-fear- _wrong_ of that touch, he shies away from it, unhappy and unable to understand _why_.)

At the time, he didn’t know what it was, didn’t understand. Now, though… now, he does, and he wishes he didn’t. Pretends he doesn’t. When that doesn’t work, he clings to the idea that this is a fraction of his penance for the evil he has done.

(Often, after that, in his memories, the door opens, closes, opens again- and there is another. The memory loops, jolting and skipping, over and over in a blurred stream of half-impressions that he couldn’t pick apart even if he wanted to. He has no idea how long he spent in that room, how many visitors he took, how many times this happened. It’s all loops, jump-cuts, distortions and fragments, enough to drive him mad if he hadn’t been already.)

Then – and this, _this_ is the bit he struggles with, the bit he worries and prods at and can’t fit nice and neat and easy into the box of _horrors-I-do-not-think-about_ tucked in the dark corners of his brain – he remembers the _gentleness_.

(The low murmur of soft words, crooning and gentle, and a hand in his hair, petting the greasy, sweat-stiff locks of it. The padded cuffs coming off. He curls into a ball, moaning with animal displeasure, the words he could have used to object stolen from him by his own mind. The hand in his hair stays, though, scritching at his scalp, the voice talking soft and low and calming throughout it all.

When he eventually uncurls, the voice and the hands coax him off the bed, back into his clothes and down the hall at a slow, whimpering shuffle to the bathroom. Coax him into the bath – warm, unlike the usual perfunctory cold scrub from the other nurses – and wash him, hair-shoulders-chest-genitals with careful attentiveness. He stops his whimpering, his whining and groaning, and instead stares with quiet fascination at the drifting soap-suds atop the water. At the patterns they make as he moves his hands. He enjoys the warmth in silence, and the touch, and the quiet, soothing drone of that gentle, easy voice.)

There was precious little that was gentle and kind in the asylum, nurses and healers stretched thin and overworked and drained dry by the unrelenting misery of the place, but _this_ … Caleb remembers, even through the grey fog, the easy, healing peace of that warm bath.

(He stops taking baths, after the asylum.)

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me @ sparxwrites on tumblr for more content, including headcanons, fanmixes, and smaller fics that don't make it onto here.


End file.
